V.I.P. Treatment

Bruno the Brussels griffon, age one, commutes to lower Manhattan from his home in Jackson Heights. He rides the E train in a blue bag slung over the shoulder of either Jeff Simmons, a former adviser to the mayoral candidate Bill Thompson, or Alfonso Quiroz, a Con Edison spokesman, and spends his mornings and afternoons at Spot, a doggy-day-care facility on Murray Street, where he has a reputation for being rambunctious, happy-go-lucky, and a bit of a “ladies’ man,” as Simmons puts it. Bruno has light-brown fur, a black face, plaintive eyes that remind Quiroz of the young boy in the 1948 Italian movie “The Bicycle Thief,” and more than five hundred Facebook friends. His brief disappearance the other day prompted Yetta Kurland, an attorney in the West Village, to e-mail some twenty thousand people in search of help. One wrote back, “Dear Yetta, I am living in Paris, France, for the moment.” Most of the other e-mail recipients were Manhattanites, neighborhood activists and journalists whom Kurland had courted during her failed run for City Council, last fall. “But we all know somebody who has an aunt or an uncle in Queens,” she explained recently, and added, “I ran on a humane platform, of awareness to animal issues.”

Bruno’s escape came on a day when Simmons and Quiroz had chosen to leave him behind in their apartment, with a dog-walker. “We found a friend of a friend who takes care of a blind cat,” Quiroz said. “You would think if there’s anybody who’s good with animals it’s someone who takes care of a blind and elderly cat.” Evidently not: within ten minutes of the dog-walker’s arrival Bruno bolted into the street. The dog-walker then hailed a cab to give chase—and ended up leaving Bruno’s collar and leash in the back seat. Thus began Operation Save Bruno, a P.R. campaign run with an efficiency rarely observed in municipal politics. Quiroz, a one-time loser for City Council in the Twenty-fifth District, commissioned a series of robo-calls to inform neighbors in the 11372 Zip Code of a dog on the loose. Mike DenDekker, a Queens assemblyman, and Helen Sears, a former City Council member, volunteered to canvass Jackson Heights, while, over on the Upper East Side, Gayle Horwitz, a former deputy comptroller, visited a local shelter, in case Bruno had hopped on the subway, attempting the commute solo. Simmons, who years ago had worked for the cable channel NY1, successfully planted a report on the next morning’s news, and the doggy-day-care owners at Spot drove out to Queens to assist in placing flyers on car windshields and telephone poles along Northern Boulevard. “After we got forty blocks away from their house, there were some very scary neighborhoods,” one of them recalled. “If I was fearing for our safety, then Bruno was definitely fearing for his.”

As it turned out, Bruno had long since found safety, in College Point, in the home of Juan Arroyave, a Colombian window installer, who spotted a small dog dodging trucks on Roosevelt Avenue and scooped him up. “He was going to keep the dog,” Quiroz said. “But just by happenstance he went out shopping on Northern Boulevard the next day and saw the posters.” About thirty hours had passed. Simmons and Quiroz welcomed Bruno home with ten liver treats. (He threw up.) By then, Bruno had become such a neighborhood celebrity that Quiroz felt compelled to bring him to a nearby park, for a meet-and-greet. “There was an e-waste recycling event going on,” Quiroz said. “Everybody was crying, and they were giving him kisses.” Quiroz made a five-minute YouTube video of the occasion, complete with swelling music and a clip from “The Bicycle Thief,” which Yetta Kurland then e-mailed to her original list of twenty thousand. “I just wanted to let you all know that, thanks to your help, against all odds, Bruno was reunited with his family,” she wrote. Bill Thompson, who has a couple of pet lizards, but no dogs, e-mailed Simmons a note of congratulations.

So Bruno may be “the most well-known dog in Jackson Heights,” according to Quiroz, but on Murray Street last week he cut a fairly ordinary profile, stopping to pee on a planter across from the Borough of Manhattan Community College and at one point squaring off against a pit bull, who looked unimpressed. “We as humans should try to emulate dogs more,” one of the owners of Spot said. “Bruno’s going to have no memory of what he’s gone through. But we will, forever.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.